Announced today, the open source community will be able to buy the Snowball development boards that use ST-Ericsson's AP9500 chipset and run free open source software and tools that have been optimized by Linaro.

Software developers now have access to application processors that can provide the performance of a PC with the power footprint of mobile. Combining dual core Cortex-A9 and Mali GPU processors with open source software that has been optimized by Linaro offers software developers the option to create code and products on a platform that costs less than a netbook, has better performance and sustains battery life longer.

"Developers will be able to come to the Linaro website and download the latest kernel, board support package and tools and know they are getting a great foundation to base their code or product on." said Stephen Doel, COO, Linaro in the availability announcement. "Our evaluation builds and validation test farm will ensure that there is a quick way to utilise our engineering directly with the major software distributions on low cost boards such as the Snowball SDK and PDK."